Attorneys and accountants are told that they need to blog if they want to get clients. Blogs are a magic marketing tool. If you blog it they will come.

It’s way more complicated than that.

About 40% of my revenue comes from attorneys who find me using Google. It’s because of my blog, but in a roundabout way. The people who read my blog (random consumers) aren’t my clients (attorneys). But in searching for things related to fraud and finding my blog, the readers have increased my Google rankings for important search terms. Attorneys use those search terms, and they get to my website.

But I’ve been blogging since 2005. This site is therefore very rich in content that helps people learn about fraud and what I do. I have invested hundreds of hours into the blog for this payoff.

Creating a blog today and expecting a payoff in weeks or months is a bad idea. Having a copywriter create standard legal or accounting content is ineffective because they don’t really know the ins and outs of your work. That standard content isn’t interesting to readers, so they don’t bother coming back to the blog. Spending money on SEO (search engine optimization) is a waste because it often doesn’t work the way they tell you it will.

Blogs DO increase the visibility of a firm if they’re done right. You need original content written by the attorney or the accountant, and it needs to be interesting to your readers. You have to have a long-term commitment to the blog because it’s not going to “get you business” for a long time. You need the right strategy behind the blog, one that fits into your overall marketing strategy for your firm.

You have to measure your results. In the beginning, this means looking at your readership and seeing what brings more readers and what draws more engagement (comments and sharing) from people. After you’ve been blogging for a year or two, you can start to measure how many potential clients found you because of the blog. But remember that it is difficult to directly trace revenue back to a blog, so that can’t be your only measure of success.